Controversy

The release of this jailbreak was specifically designed to pressure the Chronic Dev Team into not releasing SHAtter, and instead implement the limera1n exploit into greenpois0n; after releasing limera1n, releasing SHAtter would uselessly disclose another bootrom exploit to Apple.

Geohot's rationale was that Apple already discovered, through internal testing, the limera1n exploit, making it very likely that it will be fixed in the next bootrom revision. Because iBoot code is present both in the bootrom and firmware, and because firmware is refreshed much more often than bootrom code, any fix in this code branch would appear first in firmware. Geohot observed his limera1n exploit was closed in firmware and concluded that it would almost certainly be fixed in the next bootrom revision, whereas SHAtter still has a chance of remaining useful for an indefinite amount of time. Both vulnerabilities ended up being patched in the iPad 2. It was fixed before the release of limera1n according to the build number. This has been confirmed by p0sixninja.

limera1n's untethered userland exploit for iOS 4.0 and 4.1 was obtained by geohot under questionable circumstances from comex. Comex did end up fixing the kernel patching code by beta2, so as to not break users' devices.

Hacktivation

limera1n will copy hacktivation.dylib to /usr/lib and change entries to com.apple.mobile.lockdown.plist, whether it has been activated using iTunes or not. This, while helpful to many, can also be harmful to legitimate activators. For a guide on how to remove this hacktivation on iTunes activated devices, see the link below.